DG04 project presentation - Inforum

User Interfaces for 

Information Retrieval on the 

WWW 

Gary Marchionini 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

march@ils.unc.edu 

INFORUM 2005 

Prague 

May 24-27, 2005

Message 

• On the WWW, the User Interface is the librarian. 

• HCI and IR are related fields that have strong 

traditions that have been energized by WWW. 

• The intersection of these fields offers interesting 

new opportunities for high-impact R&D 

• Integrating the human and system interaction is 

the main design challenge: syminforosis— 

people continuously engaged with meaningful 

information 

Gary Marchionini, UNC-Chapel Hill INFORUM 2005

Outline 

• IR and the WWW 

• HCI and the WWW 

• HCIR rooted in system development 

• Examples 

– Open Video 

– Relation Browser 

• Challenges and Opportunities 


Content-Centered Retrieval as Matching 

Document Representations to Query 

Representations 

Surrogates 

Match 

Algorithm 

Surrogates 

Terms 

Query Form A 

Document 

Space Sample Sample 

Query 

Space 

Vectors 

Query Form B 

Etc.. 

Etc.. 

A powerful paradigm that has driven IR R&D for half a century. 

Evaluation metric is effectiveness of the match. (e.g., recall and precision). 


WWW Content Trend 

• Content Features (queries too) 

– Not only text 

• Statistics, images, music, code, streams, biochemical 

– Multimedia, multilingual 

–Dynamic 

• Temporal (e,g., blogs, wikis, sensor streams) 

• Conditional (e.g., computed links, recommendations) 

• Content Relationships 

– Hyperlinks, new metadata, aggregations 

– Digital Libraries, personal collections 

• Content acquires history 


Responses to Content Trend 

• Link analysis 

• Multiple sources of evidence (fusion) 

– Authors’ words (e.g., full text IR) 

– Indexer/abstractor words (e.g., OPACs) 

– Authors’ citations/links (e.g., ISI, Google) 

– Readers’ search paths (e.g., recommenders, opinion miners) 

– Machine generated features and relationships 

• Two key challenges: 

– What new relationships can we leverage (human and machine)? 

– How can we integrate multiple sources of evidence? 


Installed User Base Trend 

• Technical advances and technical literacy allows 

us to leverage information seeker intelligence 

– Rather than sole dependence on matching 

algorithms, focus on flow of representations and 

actions in situ as people think with these new tools 

and information resources 

• Web and TV remotes have legitimized browsing 

as human-controlled information seeking 

• To leverage human intelligence and effort, 

people must assume responsibilities: beyond the 

two-word, single query 

• Aim at understanding rather than retrieval 


Responses to People Trend 

• Adapt techniques to WWW 

– Relevance feedback 

– Query expansion 

– User modeling/profiles, SDI services 

• Recommender systems 

– Explicit and implicit models 

• Capture everything (e.g., Lifebits) 

• User Interfaces 

– Dynamic queries 

– Agile views 


An Expanded Model: 

Think of IR from the perspective of 

an active human with information 

needs, information skills, powerful 

IR resources, and situated in 

global and local connected 

communities, all of which evolve 

over time 


Human-Computer Communication 

Model of HCI 

Brain 

mental 

models 

hands 

voice 

etc. 

CONCEPTUAL INTERFACE 

(Rules) 

Mind 

task system 

eyes 

ears 

etc. 

Language 

Rate 

Half Duplex 

etc. 

NOISE 

Hardware 

conceptual 

models 

display 

speaker 

etc. 

CONCEPTUAL INTERFACE 

(Rules) 

Software 

task user 

keyboard 

mouse 

etc. 

Commands 

Menus 

Direct Manipulation 

etc. 

A user-oriented model that has driven R&D. Evaluation based 

on user time, accuracy, and satisfaction. 


HCI WWW Trends 

• First decade of WWW as great equalizer 

(existing users get impoverished, but we 

admit MANY more people) 

• Universal access 

• Platform independence (lots of devices) 

• Enhanced browsers, specialized browsers 

• Interface Servers 

• Social awareness (user is not alone) 


HCIR 

• Trend toward getting people closer to the 

information they need 

– Closer to the backend 

– Closer to the meaning 

• Increasing responsibility as well as control 

• More demanding and knowledgeable installed 

base 

• Ubiquity, digital libraries, e-commerce as 

extended memories and tools (personal and 

shared) 


Document 

Surrogates Surrogates 

Terms 

Match 

Algorithm 

Query Form A 

Space Sample Sample 

Query 

Space 

Vectors 

Etc.. 

Query Form B 

Etc.. 

HCIR: Bringing User Closer to World 

P 

Rules 

Structures 

Context 

Labels 

Help 

Start/Stop 

C 

Gary Marchionini, UNC-Chapel Hill INFORUM 2005 

World

Key Challenges 

• Linking conceptual interface to system 

backend 

– metadata generation 

– alternative representations and control 

mechanisms 

• Raising user literacy and involvement 

– Engaging without insulting or annoying 

• Moving beyond retrieval to understanding 

– context 


Two examples of getting people 

involved in continuous decision 

making and interaction with 

information resources: dynamic 

queries and the agile views 

interaction framework instantiated 

in Open Video and Relation 

Browser 


Open Video Example 

www.open-video.org 

• Open access digital library of digital video for 

education and research 

• 2600+ video segments: MPEG1, MPEG-2, 

MPEG-4, QuickTime 

• Multiple visual surrogates 

• Agile Views Design Framework 

– Different types of views 

• Overviews, previews, shared views 

– Multiple examples of views 

– Dynamic control mechanisms 


Alternative Overviews of Result 

Sets 


Alternative Previews for a Specific 

Video Segment 


Relation Browser Example 

www.idl.ils.unc.edu/rave 

• A general purpose dynamic query interface for 

databases with a small number of facets (~10) 

and a small number of categories in each facet 

(~10). 

• Easy to look ahead (overviews and previews) 

• Couples interactive partitioning/exploration with 

string query 

• Semi-automatic category generation and 

webpage classification 


Relation Browser Start State for Energy 

Information Admin Website 


Mousing over “Coal” under the “Fuel type” 

category reveals the distribution of coal related 

web pages to other categories 


Click on Natural Gas and Mouse 

over Residential Sector 


RB++ showing ‘hous’ typed in title 

field 


Some Interaction Principles and 

Caveats in These Examples 

• Principles 

– Look ahead without penalty 

– Minimize scrolling and clicking 

– Alternative ways to slice and dice 

– Closely couple search, browse, and examine 

– Continuous engagement—useful attractors 

– Treasures to surface 

• Caveats 

– Scalability (getting metadata to client side) 

– Metadata crucial 

• We are working on automatically creating partitions 

– Increasing expectations about useful results (answers!) 


Long Term Paradigm: Information 

Interaction as Core Life Process 

Examples represent early ways to get the information seeker more 

involved in the information seeking process—there is plenty more to do. 

Like eating we have varying expectations, invest different levels of effort, 

and use diverse and ubiquitous infrastructures. Key challenge is to span 

boundaries between cyberinfrastructure and the ‘real’ world. 

Cyberinfrastructure 

Physical and Intellectual Reality 


Coda 

• Our hopes that we can create systems 

(solutions) that ‘do’ IR for us are unreasonable 

• Our expectations that people can find and 

understand information without thinking and 

investing effort are unreasonable. 

• We aim to develop ‘systems’ that involve people 

and machines continuously learning and 

changing together. Google would not work as 

well next month if there were not a large group 

of employees tuning the system, adding new 

spam filters, and crawlers checking out pages 

and links continuously. 


Thank You! 

Questions and Discussion 

march@ils.unc.edu

DG04 project presentation - Inforum

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